“Well?” Maggie said.
“Go back, Mother, and finish your degree. Harvard would take you back, and even if you never use the degree, you’d have it. It would mean something to you. It would mean—”
Beecher Stubbs descended at that moment, delighted to see Emma and pleased that Maggie looked so well—so young and so well—and wasn’t Dixie Kizer sweet to go with her to the fat lady store when she herself was a size eight, or ten at most, but probably an eight. Dixie was a dear.
Maggie and Emma looked over at the table where Dixie sat alone. They smiled and she returned their smile.
And how wonderful, Beecher said, that Emma was going for a dig in Greece or somewhere and Cole was doing research at Hopkins, it was clear that Maggie and Philip had done something magic with those kids, she had been saying exactly that to Calvin only yesterday. She had to dash now and let them finish their salads—so health-conscious and smart of them—and she would call, she would call.
“Get the Ph.D., Mother,” Emma said, “or you could turn into Beecher Stubbs. Think about it.”
They ate in silence for a while and then Maggie said, “Maybe I’ll look into it.”
“Promise?”
“Promise. But not a word to your father.”
“It’ll be our secret! Terrific! Oh, I’m so excited for you, Mother, I’m gonna tell you my secret. I’m in a relationship with Bubby. And, Mother, he’s really wonderful.”
“A relationship? Oh, darling. You’re only nineteen.”
“Twenty, almost. And age has nothing to do with it.”
“But Emma …”
“It’s not like I’m in love with him or anything.”
“Em, sweetheart …”
“I’m just seeing him, for Christ’s sake.” She was trying very hard to be reasonable.
“Seeing?”
“God! Bubby is right! You should never tell your parents anything!”
Maggie reached for her glass of wine. “It’s just that I don’t want you to get hurt,” she said. “It’s so easy, at your age, to make a terrible mistake.”
“At my age?”
“At any age.” Maggie put down the glass. “Look at me,” she said.
On Monday Philip and Maggie drove Emma to the airport for her flight to Los Angeles. They sat in the lounge and made obligatory conversation.
“You’ve got your ticket? Money? A book?” Philip said. Emma nodded. Maggie said, “I hope it’s a good flight. I hope you don’t get stuck with somebody awful or boring. I hope there’s somebody to meet you in L.A.” Emma smiled and nodded again. “These places get more crowded every day,” Philip said, “and yet they claim they’re losing money.” “I hate airports,” Maggie said. They all agreed.
Finally it was over and Emma’s flight was announced.
They kissed good-bye, and then they kissed again, and this time Emma leaned close to her father and whispered, “Cole is wrong. There’s nothing wrong with Mother. Just try to persuade her to go back to school.” Then with a big smile, she gave him another hug, and her mother another hug and a kiss, and rushed off, the last to board the flight. Maggie and Philip waited until she disappeared from sight.
Driving home, they were quiet for a long while and then Maggie mentioned, casually, that Emma was seeing her archeology professor.
“Seeing? In quotes?”
“In quotes. He’s fifty years old.”
“Jesus Christ. And she’s nineteen.”
“Twenty, almost.”
“Is she all right? Is she gonna be all right? Did you talk to her?”
“What she’s doing is irrational,” Maggie said. “You can’t talk people out of doing what’s irrational.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll survive.”
“Shit, we’ll all survive.”
Maggie fell silent.
Philip, driving, fell silent too. He was thinking that with almost no effort he could turn the steering wheel some few inches to the right and press his foot hard on the accelerator, doing eighty, then eighty-five, and he could crash the car into one of those huge concrete and steel overpass supports. It would take less than a minute. A fiery explosion. And it would all be over.
He lifted his foot from the accelerator and they slowed down from sixty-five to sixty and then to fifty-five.
“The life you save,” Maggie said, “may be your own.”
Philip looked over at her.
“It’s from Flannery O’Connor,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about going back to school.”
7
Beecher Stubbs was the daughter of a psychiatrist who had raised her to believe that anything could be talked about. She was disappointed, therefore, that her lunch with Dixie Kizer had produced so little. She had hoped to sound Dixie on her friendship with Maggie Tate, and if it appeared they were close enough, to ask Dixie to intervene with Maggie about her drinking, which, it was now clear, had become a problem. Philip didn’t see it, obviously, since he’d done nothing about it. And somebody had to do something. Why not Dixie? But it turned out Dixie scarcely knew Maggie and anyway she had her own troubles. Hal Kizer, Beecher suspected, was into drugs or perhaps boys, but whatever it was, she could see that poor Dixie also needed help.
“Calvin,” she said, “I think you should speak to Philip. Somebody’s got to intervene.”
Calvin was reading the newspaper and did not reply.
“Gin,” she said. “The consolation of sailors and scrubwomen. Somebody should speak to Philip.”
She said, “Philip should do something.”
And she said, loudly, “Calvin!”
He looked up from his newspaper.
“I’m talking to you, Calvin. Your reading is an act of aggression.”
He lowered his newspaper, closed his eyes, and listened.
“I’m a friend of Maggie’s, but I can’t do it. She’s too private. She’s too, I don’t know, good for me to confront. I’m not afraid of anybody, as you know, but …”
“I know.”
“… but there’s something about her, she’s essentially superior—I mean, she not only thinks she is but she is—and I can’t be the one to do it.”
“I think that’s very wise of you.”
She gave him a look.
“And then there’s Dixie Kizer and that husband. She wouldn’t tell me what’s wrong, but I sense these things, you know, I intuit.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Well, she told me about this dream she had. In this dream she was sleeping on her chaise longue—she says ‘longue,’ French pronunciation—and she became aware of somebody standing in the room looking at her. You know, that old dream. So she woke up and she realized, she said, that she was both terrified and in love. That’s the point, Calvin. Terror and love. So it has to be the husband. I don’t think he hits her, I asked her straight out and her answer was unequivocal, no. She wasn’t faking it. I think it must be sex. Boys, perhaps, or couples. Yes, couples.” She brightened at the thought. She stopped pacing. “Or maybe whole groups of people. Orgies. You’ll have to find out, Calvin.”
“Leave these people alone, Beecher. It sounds like they have quite enough trouble already.”
“Well, Calvin, we have obligations as thinking people and as citizens and as members of the medical community.”
Calvin put down his paper. “You’re a good woman, Beecher. You’re kind. You’re caring. But you shouldn’t meddle.”
“What happened to being Christian, Calvin? Is that meddling?”
“Christianity, like everything else, has had its day. We’re in the era of live and let live.”
“I’ll make dinner,” she said. “I just can’t talk to you when you’re in the ironic mode, Calvin.”
They looked at each other for a while.
“I’ll speak to Philip,” he said.
“And I’ll tackle the Hal Kizer problem, whatever it is.”
“Don’t meddle, Beech.”
Sh
e disappeared into the kitchen. She got out the milk and the bowls and the fake sugar. She opened the box of Oat Squares and put them on the table. She got two spoons.
“Dinner’s ready,” she called, and they set to it.
8
Two weeks had passed since “the event,” as Philip had come to think of the break-in. Earlier in the week he had sat up drinking and then, on toward three o’clock, he got into his car and drove out to Winchester and swung by the Kizers’ house. All the windows were dark. No sound, no movement anywhere on the street. Was she sitting in the sunroom waiting for him?
He cruised by the Aspergarters’ house—why, he asked himself, why was he doing this?—and then on to the Fioris, the McGuinns, the Gaspards. He swung back again to the Kizers. How could she not have seen him that night? She must have. She had said as much. “I know,” she said.
He had everything and he seemed determined to ruin it all. He was worried about his wife when really he was the one who ought to be committed. What kind of lunacy was this?
He would make one more loop down Woodlawn and then he would go home. He drove by the house, slowly. And then a second time. And a third.
Then he drove home.
9
Emma sent them ecstatic postcards from Disneyland and from Greece, and Maggie and Philip found themselves getting used to the idea that Emma, their baby, was having an affair with a fifty-year-old professor named Bubby. They didn’t like it but there it was, a fact, and they had decided to live with it. Emma would grow up, she’d profit from this somehow, if only she didn’t get hurt. But still, Maggie said, fifty years old? I know, I know, Philip said, it’s unspeakable, it’s unthinkable, and suggested that maybe, just maybe, Maggie might want to talk to a psychiatrist about Emma. He spoke cautiously, but he ended by saying that if she were to see a shrink, she could maybe talk about their marriage also, about whatever it was that was slowing things down between them, about …
Slowing things down?
Causing friction, he explained, making their relationship less smooth, coming between them sexually even. Maggie looked at him without saying anything, and so he went on. He would be willing to see the shrink too, they could make it a kind of counseling session, dueling therapies. Dual therapies, he meant. He laughed, sort of. And they say Freud is dead.
She would think about it, Maggie said.
In fact, Maggie had been seeing a shrink for some months, not regularly and not very successfully, and now that Emma had left for her long hot summer of dirt-sifting with the archeologist, Maggie determined to get her life in order. No pills. A weekly visit to Leona, her shrink, with complete honesty about everything. And a look-see at her abandoned work on the Ph.D.
Maggie cut down on the pills, even though it meant she slept fitfully and was cranky all the time and had begun to look like hell. She decided to make a clean break of it and throw the pills out: the Xanax, the Halcion, the Nembutal, everything. She was about to dump them down the toilet when the gesture struck her as melodramatic and self-indulgent, so she tossed the bottles into the wastebasket and the hell with it. To prove her sincerity, though, she went outside and emptied the wastebasket into the trash can behind the garage. Sayonara. An hour later she went out to the trash can and dug around in the mess until she had rescued the pills. She took them upstairs and hid them at the back of her lingerie drawer. She decided to take only half as many as before.
She made an appointment with Leona and kept it.
“I drink, I take pills, I’m turning into an angry bitch. And my daughter, who is a sophomore in college, is sleeping with her fifty-year-old archeology professor.”
Leona listened.
“His name is Bubby.”
Leona continued to listen.
“Needless to say, I’m unhappy.” Maggie waited a moment and said, “My husband is a psychiatrist, as you know, so I’m familiar with the listening trick.”
Leona smiled.
“Which means you’ll have to say something.”
“Very well,” Leona said. “How much do you drink? What pills do you take? How often? How many? Are you angry at your daughter or at your husband or could it be you’re angry at yourself? Where shall we begin?”
It was an exhausting session and Maggie did not keep her next appointment.
She did, however, make an appointment with the Chairman of the English Department. They had met off and on at the Memorial Hall Lecture Series and of course, the Chairman said, he knew her husband, by reputation at least, and so he was perfectly willing to have a talk with her.
“Now, what is it?” He gave her a smile he held a fraction too long and it turned into a grimace.
Maggie had prepared a little speech about her Ph.D. work on Jane Austen, her desire to pick up where she had left off, her anxiety about returning to scholarship after all this time. Now the speech struck her as whiny and stupid. Nonetheless he listened with what seemed like interest.
“And?” the Chairman said.
“I don’t know theory,” she said. “The new theory.”
“There are books. There are some very good books.”
“I was thinking of courses I might take that would catch me up. Until I get my feet under me.”
“And what courses would these be?” He glanced at his watch.
“Well, I thought you—somebody—might recommend something. Do you offer courses in theory for people who need to catch up?”
“Mrs.—um—as I’m sure you know, everybody is caught up by the time they get here. Sorry. That’s just a fact. And what, really, can a Ph.D. matter at your age?”
Written in the air between them, she read: Finis, The End, Sayonara.
“Well, thank you,” she said, and stood up. “You’ve been very generous with your time.”
“Please,” the Chairman said, aware he had gone too far. “I’m sure there’s something we can do for you. I’m sure the situation is not impossible at all. We have courses, of course we do, and there are books. I’m quite sure that the head of graduate studies can arrange …”
But she left, her face very red, and she vowed she would never invade English Department territory again.
That afternoon the head of graduate studies phoned her. Maggie told him she was busy, she could not talk, and she went upstairs and took an extra Xanax. When he phoned again the next morning she refused to answer. He left a long and detailed message explaining that he was not the Chairman, he was the head of graduate studies, and that he was sorry she had had to deal with the Chairman, who was a renowned scholar but a misogynist, and would she please come in and talk? They all felt very bad about this.
She knew that what they all felt bad about was offending the wife of a big deal at the Med School, but when the head of graduate studies called yet again, Maggie went in to see him. Within a few minutes he had arranged for her to sit in on Phoebe Ritson’s survey of postmodern literary theory. They offered very few courses in the summer, but she was in luck because Phoebe Ritson would be teaching and Phoebe Ritson, he assured her, was hot.
Maggie attended Phoebe Ritson’s first class and she tried to take notes, but the lecture was dazzling and incomprehensible and she realized she needed a lot of background study, and fast. She went to the library and dug out books by Husserl and Heidegger and Hegel. She settled down to look them over. They were philosophy, she expected that, but they were like no philosophy she had ever studied. There were no basic principles. There was no recognizable world. She was getting very nervous. She gathered up the books and took them to Withdrawals. She could concentrate better at home. She waited patiently in line, breathing deeply, thinking of waves breaking on the beach, and she was beginning to feel calmer, more in control, as she handed over the books to be scanned and returned to her. The checkout girl raised her eyebrows as she handed back the books. It was that finally, the raised eyebrows, that brought on Maggie’s attack of panic.
Now, as she came down the steps from the library, her arms full of books, she wanted
a Coke and a Xanax and she wanted to scream. She was too old, too out of touch, this was all a middle-aged delusion. She wanted a drink.
“Maggie,” someone said, but she kept on. “Maggie?”
Despite herself Maggie turned to see who was calling her. It was that idiot, Dixie Kizer.
“I’m in a rush, Dixie.”
“I know. I see that. Can I walk with you? To your car?”
Maggie put her head down and kept walking.
“You were so nice to me. I wanted to thank you.”
“Well, you’re welcome.”
“I act like a fool sometimes, whenever I … you know… say something dumb and Hal points it out … I just don’t know what to do so I …” The words trickled away into silence.
“You’re perfectly fine. There’s nothing the matter with you.”
“Beecher Stubbs was very nice to me too. She likes me, she says. But I do act like a fool sometimes. Don’t you think?”
Maggie stopped and turned on her. “Oh, for God’s sake. You’re young and you’re beautiful and you’ve got a life ahead of you. Stop whining. Do something with it.”
“Take a course, you mean. Like you.”
Maggie stared at her. “A course?”
“I couldn’t do that. I’d never have the courage.”
“What makes you think I’m taking a course?”
“I went looking for you.”
“But what makes you think …?”
“All those books in your arms. Husserl.”
“I am taking a course, as a matter of fact.”
“Yes.”
Despite her exasperation Maggie noticed that her panic had subsided. She was annoyed, angry even, but she was in charge. It felt good to be in charge. They were near Starbucks, and Maggie proposed that they get a coffee or something, maybe a Coke.
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